Thursday, April 9, 2015

My very first blog was started about 10 years ago and it was called Here We Go...Again. My son was very young and he and my husband and our older son would play Super Mario. I would often here that little Mario voice saying, "Here We Go" with a slight Italian accent. It's was like white noise in the background of my life. My husband and I had been married for about 7 years and we were raising four children. Two teenagers from his first marriage and two little ones of our own. I laughed often as I told people we were dealing with dating and diapers!

I started my blog because we had just moved to Oregon with three of our four children and we knew not a soul. As these things often do, it worked out. Soon we had a small but close network of friends and alought we missed our family, we forged onward and made a new life for ourselves. One we loved, despite the constant rain of the Mid-Willamette Valley. That was 2005.

In July of 2013, we packed up the U-haul and made our way back to Los Angeles. My parents, both in their 80's, were starting to feel the effects of their age and we answered the call. So now, our older children our grown. Our daughter has a family of her own and continues to live in Oregon. Our son is an adult and is forging ahead with his life. We're glad to be close to him again, although we miss our daughter and her family terribly. Our younger ones are still children but on the cusp of life changing phenomena. Now the joke is that we're dealing with puberty, menopause and dementia. It's not always funny.

So here we go again. We're starting anew from a place we left long ago. They say you can never come home and I think I understand more clearly than ever that "home" is not a place to come to but a place you create in your heart. This is my heart's journey. It's not always sad, not always pretty but hopefully like me, you learn to recognize the moments of grace in the mess, moments of joy in the sadness and that regardless of the journey, we're all headed in the same direction.